Rural Matters – Local Food

These days it seems the most popular person to be in the food system is the “local farmer”. Farmers markets are popping up everywhere, and their size and popularity grow all the time. Local food is trendy – even the First Family is in on it.

But as anyone who has ever raised grain or livestock can tell you, the farmer is not the only person in the chain of players from her farm to your fork. In addition to producers, your food chain includes processors, distributors or transporters, and retailers.

In other words, to have a truly local food system, we also need local butchers, bakers and millers, local truck drivers, local grocers, and a community that supports them in all their efforts.

In the world of farm and food policy, we’ve paid a lot of attention to production end of the food system. It’s an obvious place to start. We have programs within the Farm Bill to develop new or “beginning” farmers, help them secure loans and down payments, and transition to organic agriculture. But most products aren’t made to eat directly out of the field. Even salad greens or apples, things we typically eat raw and straight from the field, must be washed and sorted before your local farmer will sell them.

As Tom Philpott pointed out in early November, the infrastructure for small-scale processing is woefully inadequate, having suffered decades of atrophy – to the point where an otherwise profitable farmer can be driven out of business because she has no where to take her pigs for slaughter, her grain to be milled or her tomatoes to be “sauced”.

Small-scale, certified community kitchens, like this one in Montana or this one in Tennessee, are beginning to fill some of this need. There are a few mobile slaughter facilities gaining traction, but not enough to meet demand and too new to measure their long term viability. Not many community colleges offer classes on how to humanely kill and butcher an animal anymore. In the Midwest where I live, there used to be a local “meat locker” in every small town – now there are hardly any. How will we supply the food system with local meat or local flour if there the nearest facility is too far away or doesn’t exist at all?

I believe the answer lies in the example we have set for ourselves with beginning farmers. Society is beginning to see farming as a dignified and profitable profession again, and with that comes market demand for good farmers, respect for the profession, government programs to encourage new farmers, and training and educational opportunities. We need similar opportunities for small-scale butchers, millers, bakers and other types of processors.

Local food distribution has received even less attention than processing, and it is a complex piece of the food chain we’ll have to get creative about if local food will be available in grocery stores. In Nebraska where I live, the distributor serving most of the rural grocery stores has a weekly buying minimum. A grocer won’t even consider buying produce from a local farmer if it will put them below their minimum because the distributor levies a fine.

Challenges like buying minimums and aggregating products from multiple farms crop up when dealing with local foods. Some models are attempting to overcome these challenges, but we’ll need more ideas to fit the diversity of situations in which they arise.

Retailing healthy, affordable food has also gained attention lately in the term “food desert“, but it’s an issue worth repeating. We all need a grocery store nearby, unless you are one of the few that produce all your own food. Without a grocery store, people will not want to live in our communities and neighborhoods, which makes them less vibrant and more vulnerable to failure. Grocery stores are more than food retail, however – they are often the focal point of a town or neighborhood where people go to see friends, swap recipes and catch up on local gossip.

Local ownership of a grocery is critical so that food dollars continue to circulate within the community. Additionally, a locally owned grocery store is not only more likely to purchase from a local farmer than a store owned by an impersonal, profit-driven corporation. In order to have more local grocers, we need to teach young people entrepreneurship in addition to community pride and loyalty. Again, our treatment of beginning farmers gives us a good example of policy solutions to encourage more young people to enter the grocery business.

I used to think there were four distinct pieces to a local food system – production, processing, distribution, and retail. Now I realize there is a fifth – community. Without an involved community of customers who believe in what the local farmer, miller, distributor and grocer is doing, none of them will last very long.

Community is important in another sense as well. Most of the farmers who grow our food live in rural places, and they want to live in active, thriving communities too. Therefore, if we care about local food systems, we should all be concerned with the survival of rural communities regardless of where we live. Rural development is often the red-headed stepchild of the Farm Bill, receiving little attention and even less funding. For local food to expand, we need to give respect and resources to rural communities and their residents.

If growing a local food system is our goal, it must begin with vibrant communities, and then follow with genuine opportunities for careers everywhere in the food chain. Expanding our policy solutions beyond producers will help the idea of local food move forward from a trend to a permanent fixture of our food system.

One Comment

This is a great start, but what’s missing in this account is the gorilla in the pantry — state and federal regulations that make it difficult, if not impossible, and always expensive to process food grown locally. In some states, farmers can sell canned jams and jellies and maybe even tomatoes without further ado. Here in California, you need a “commercial kitchen” — i.e., acres of stainless steel and specialized plumbing that come in at $100,000 to $200,000. Solution, community kitchens. So you say. We just built one here in Willits, gutting and rebuilding the Little Lake Grange kitchen. Cost $175,000 and it’s beautiful. Trouble is, users have to carry $1 million personal liability insurance to walk in the door, have a food handler’s license to sell product, and should probably carry another million in product liability insurance. It’s hard to can and market your surplus under those conditions. It’s hard to start up a small bakery business if all you’re looking to do is earn a hundred dollars extra a week with your time and talent. It’s hard to develop a product and a customer base from which to launch out further into commercial production, hard to develop a business plan and get those loans, if you have to sink heavy money into a kitchen or insurance just to get started.

Similar issues beset milk and cheese production. Sure, encouraging folks to have their own cows or goats will contribute to food security. It’s just that without more investment that most small farmers can afford, you can’t sell the milk or make the cheese for sale. “Certified” means, again, tons of stainless steel and cement, rapid cooling devices, and lots and lots of odds and ends only the inspector can tell you about. There are workarounds, like the dairy share idea, but the authorities are on the lookout to bust ‘em.

Oddly, in most places farmers can butcher and sell a fairly large quantity of chickens on farm. When you get to goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle, however, you’ve got to find a USDA certified facility, and those are few and far between, especially for the smaller species, because they have to keep running consistently enough to justify having a USDA inspector on premise full-time. Not to mention the cost of building one. Our local producers go to Eureka (almost 200 miles), Santa Rosa (100), and the Central Valley (150+). Add transportation to your expenses, please. And subtract “local”.

So there are hurdles to local processing, and it’s not just the stripping of local capabilities and infrastructure that took place over the last fifty years. It’s also the legal stripping of our ability to feed our community in the name of dubious standards of food safety. Just saying it brings tremors of doubt. Don’t we care about food safety? Yes, of course, but we need desperately to rethink how our society goes about addressing the issue, starting with careful consideration of the differences between local and national sources and markets.

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Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman